Richard Ross: ‘Juvenile-in-Justice’

Any hazy line between photojournalism and art evaporates in Richard Ross’s “Juvenile-in-Justice,” at Ronald Feldman. The pictures in this solo show, a slightly compressed version of a 2012 self-published book, come from five years that Mr. Ross spent visiting some 200 juvenile detention facilities in 31 states, photographing and interviewing inmates, male and female, ranging in age from 10 to their early 20s, with most in their mid-teens.

Some were imprisoned for violent crimes and would eventually be transferred to adult prisons. Others were in for lesser offenses and less time, though the incidence of repeat arrests indicates that future patterns are already being set. Lockdown oversight rather than outreach therapy seems the institutional rule.

The prisons in the photographs are often clean, plain, almost blank spaces, not all that different from contemporary art galleries and, it would seem, similarly conceived, though with different dynamics of power. The white-box gallery is intended as a timeless, cultureless space that gives forceful visibility to the art contained in it. The prisons are designed to throw figures of prisoners — in their Mondrian-red or yellow or black-striped uniforms — into sharp, surveillable relief and to disempower them through a kind of cultural neutralizing.

Breaking the pictures’ pristine look are the texts that accompany them, in which the young people photographed — all faces are obscured — speak of early abuse, material deprivation and emotional disturbance, realities that jail is likely to extend and exacerbate.

Conceptually, the show is a sobering trip down the dead-end street that is America’s prison system. Visually, it’s as gripping as any art around, and, in Mr. Ross’s book, comes with a memorable epigraph by Booker T. Washington: “The study of art that does not result in making the strong less willing to oppose the weak means little.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C29 of the New York edition with the headline: Richard Ross: ‘Juvenile-in-Justice’. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe